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"Though I didn’t think such was possible, my esteem for both my father and the Bible took a rather sudden spike. I was blessed to be sitting in a seminary class, while he stood, teaching. He mentioned, almost in passing, this notion that rocked my world. 'Some scholars,' he said (and by the way he said it I had a strong suspicion that he was one of those scholars), 'believe that the ‘man’ Joshua met outside the wall of Jericho was a pre-incarnate manifestation of the second person of the Trinity, a christophany.'"
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"The default sin of the human heart is to put ourselves first. 'It really is all about me!' was once a funny t-shirt slogan; it has now become a way of life. Unless preachers and Bible teachers are careful, the way we handle Scripture can actually feed this beast. We rush to application, consumed by the question, 'How is this relevant to me?'"
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The church of the twenty-first century faces many crises. One of the most serious is the crisis of preaching. Widely diverse philosophies of preaching vie for acceptance among contemporary clergy. Some see the sermon as a fireside chat; others, as a stimulus for psychological health; still others, as a commentary on contemporary politics. But some still view the exposition of sacred Scripture as a necessary ingredient to the office of preaching. In light of these views, it is always helpful to go to the New Testament to seek or glean the method and message found in the biblical record of apostolic preaching.
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"We have all heard the ancient maxim about the relationship between the Old and New Testaments: 'The new is in the old concealed, and the old is in the new revealed.' While the words concealed and revealed do not entirely accurately describe the relationship between the testaments, they do help us grasp the fundamental truth that the New Testament is found in seed form throughout the pages of the Old Testament and that the Old Testament blossoms forth as a flower in the New Testament."
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The April edition of Tabletalk is out. This month's issue looks at how a humiliated and exalted Messiah is revealed in the Old Testament, as well as how Jesus of Nazareth fulfilled those expectations.. Contributors include R.C. Sproul, John Piper, John Sittema, Albert Mohler, Elyse Fitzpatrick and R.C. Sproul Jr.
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Chad Van Dixhoorn is associate pastor of Grace Presbyterian Church in Vienna, Virginia, and senior research fellow at Wolfson College in Cambridge, UK. He has spent more than a decade studying the Westminster Assembly. In an interview in this month's edition of Tabletalk he tells about his interest in the Westminster Assembly, the project he has organized to collect books and manuscripts related to the Assembly and to make them publicly available. Many of these are now becoming available for the first time.
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The passing of the Oprah Winfrey Show is surely worthy of being described with that most overworked of clichés, as 'the end of an era.' Except, of course, it is not the end of an era so much as the morphing of Ms. Winfrey’s career into a new form. It is hard to imagine that the public has seen the last of her, and the values and culture that her show represented are here for the foreseeable future.
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"It is arrogant to answer before you hear. Humility does not presume that it knows precisely what a person is asking until the questioner has finished asking the question. How many times have I jumped to a wrong conclusion by starting to formulate my answer before I heard the whole question! Often it is the last word in the question that turns the whole thing around and makes you realize that the questioner is not asking what you thought he was."
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You've got to love the title of this one: "It Takes a Church to Raise a Child." Rev. Mark Bates is senior pastor of Village Seven Presbyterian Church and is a Bible teacher at Evangelical Christian Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. And in the March issue of Tabletalk he writes about parenting saying, "Parenting is not for the faint of heart..."
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Following a 1970s Jesus Movement conversion, I served in youth ministry, where I subjected poor students to nearly every fad imaginable — all, I told myself, to have young people come to Christ. I then served as a pastor, an office I have held for thirty years. Along the way, I have made many blunders — far too many to chronicle here. One mistake that I hope to avoid, however, is ministering with external methods that cannot give life.
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